05/09/2026 – Last month Mark Goodacre gave the keynote lecture at a conference called “Reassessing the Emergence of the Gospels: Genre, Media, Reception.” He described the current state of gospels research, and he mentions a ton of important books that have redefined the field over the last few decades. Below is a summary by Michael Waddell that was extracted from BSA here of Goodacre’s Keynote address. Note that the audio files of the addresses and the associated slides are Dropbox.
Last month Mark Goodacre gave the keynote lecture at a conference called “Reassessing the Emergence of the Gospels: Genre, Media, Reception.” He described the current state of gospels research, and he mentions a ton of important books that have redefined the field over the last few decades. The slides and audio are available here, but that can sometimes be hard to follow, so I [Waddell] thought I’d do a write-up, including links to all the books in case any of them strike your fancy.
Goodacre organized his talk as a Top Ten list, listing ten realizations that have changed the face of Gospels research.
10. Modern media are changing the way we do scholarship
Here, he mentioned the lovely online productions of some prominent Biblical scholars you may have heard of.
- Helen Bond’s and Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones’ podcast Biblical Time Machine.
- Dan McClellan’s work with Data>Dogma.
- Goodacre mentioned his own NT Pod.
- Robyn Faith Walsh’s copious online activity, working with History Valley, Misquoting Jesus, Myth Vision, Bible and Archaeology, and many others.
- He also gave a shout-out to a little outfit called the BSA you may have heard of. 😇
9. The gospels are biographies
It used to be thought that the gospels were a sui generis form of literature, and this interpretation was drilled into students’ heads. But analysis in the 21st century has demolished that idea. Here are three books Goodacre recommends to help understand how the gospels fit into the genre of an ancient bios.
- What Is a Gospel? The Genre of the Canonical Gospels by Charles H. Talbert
- What Are the Gospels? A Comparison with Graeco-Roman Biography by Richard A. Burridge
- The First Biography of Jesus: Genre and Meaning in Mark’s Gospel by Helen K. Bond
8. Memory matters
The gospels didn’t record Jesus’ words and deeds directly like a video camera; they were filtered through the memories of each observer and reteller in the chain. Understanding how memory works is crucial to knowing how gospels work, and these books are especially helpful.
- Structuring Early Christian Memory: Jesus in Tradition, Performance and Text by Rafael Rodriguez
- Jesus Tradition, Early Christian Memory, and Gospel Writing by Alan Kirk
- Reading Mark’s Gospel as a Text from Collective Memory by Sandra Huebenthal
7. The Third Quest of the Historical Jesus is over
N.T. Wright announced the Third Quest in 1986, and it emphasized the recognition of Jesus’ Jewishness and his apocalypticism. Jesus’ Jewishness is no longer in question, and the degree to which his thinking was apocalyptic is interpreted in various nuanced ways by scholars. Dividing research into numbered “quests” is no longer helpful.
- Jesus, Criteria, and the Demise of Authenticity by Chris Keith and Anthony Le Donne. Goodacre specifically recommends the forward by Morna Hooker, who saw this change coming before the Third Quest really started.
- Interpreting Jesus by Dale C. Allison Jr. moves beyond separate quests into various defensible interpretations.
- The Next Quest for the Historical Jesus by James Crossley and Chris Keith, which Joseph Nobles tirelessly summarized here at BSA last year.
6. If you only know the canonical gospels, you don’t know the canonical gospels
It used to be rare for Biblical scholars to study non-canonical texts, but understanding these less familiar works can reveal crucial context about what the canonical gospels were trying to do and how they were understood by their earliest audiences. Three recent stand-outs are:
- Eschatology and the Saviour: The ‘Gospel of Mary’ among Early Christian Dialogue Gospels by Sarah Parkhouse
- Telling the Christian Story Differently: Counter-Narratives from Nag Hammadi and Beyond by Francis Watson and Sarah Parkhouse
- Eusebius the Evangelist: Rewriting the Fourfold Gospel in Late Antiquity by Jeremiah Coogan
5. Oral tradition is so watery that it’s flowing away
Oral tradition is often described in watery terms: reservoirs, lakes, springs of tradition. But it’s as hard to hold onto as water. Should “oral tradition” be a way of describing any connections we don’t otherwise have a good way of explaining, or should we understand how oral tradition actually works on its own terms? Here are some books that work through how to responsibly understand oral tradition in the composition of the gospels.
- Behind the Gospels: Understanding the Oral Tradition by Eric Eve
- The Origins of Early Christian Literature by Robyn Faith Walsh
- Writing and Rewriting the Gospels: John and the Synoptics by James W. Barker
4. Missing pieces are missing people: enslaved people, disabled people, women, children
The “missing pieces” in understanding the historical Jesus are often missing people — those who have been consistently overlooked and ignored. Many recent books examine how the gospel stories intersect with the stories of people on the outside of the best preserved perspectives.
- Divine Bodies: Resurrecting Perfection in the New Testament and Early Christianity by Candida R. Moss
- God’s Ghostwriters: Enslaved Christians and the Making of the Bible by Candida Moss
- Rediscovering the Marys: Maria, Mariamne, Miriam by Mary Ann Beavis and Ally Kateusz
3. John has come out of isolation
25 years ago, most people thought of John’s gospel as coming from its own community, separated from and independent of the synoptics. This is rapidly changing. Now the interactions between all four canonical gospels have begin to merit intense, important study.
- John’s Transformation of Mark by Eve-Marie Becker, Helen K. Bond, and Catrin H. Williams
- What John Knew and What John Wrote: A Study in John and the Synoptics by Wendy E.S. North
- The Gospel of John: A New History by Hugo Méndez
2. Q is contested
Around the turn of the millennium, it looked like the Q hypothesis had totally taken over scholarship, but that consensus has fallen apart. Mark Goodacre had some very positive things to say about John S. Kloppenborg’s Excavating Q: The History and Setting of the Sayings Gospel, which posits the existence of Q and defends the thesis with careful analysis. But he confessed annoyance with works like the Hermeneia Critical Edition of Q, simply because it presents Q as if it were a known work and not a range of theories. Three books that challenge the Q hypothesis are:
- The Case Against Q: Studies in Markan Priority and the Synoptic Problem by Mark Goodacre
- Marcan Priority Without Q: Explorations in the Farrer Hypothesis by John C. Poirier and Jeffrey Peterson
- Relating the Gospels: Memory, Imitation and the Farrer Hypothesis by Eric Eve
1. Ancient media are changing scholarship
Just as #10 talks about modern media, Goodacre’s #1 topic was about ancient media: the process of physically composing written works in antiquity. We know far less than we’d like, but we’re learning more all the time, and it affects how we think these works may have been composed. Three good, recent books on the topic are:
- God’s Library: The Archaeology of the Earliest Christian Manuscripts by Brent Nongbri
- The Gospel as Manuscript: An Early History of the Jesus Tradition as Material Artifact by Chris Keith
- Gospel Media: Reading, Writing, and Circulating Jesus Traditions by Nicholas A. Elder
Q&A
- Mark Goodacre was asked if there are any trends in gospel scholarship that he dislikes, and after being careful to say that he didn’t want to bad-mouth any scholars in particular (at least, not on the record), he expressed “surprise and amazement” that anyone was still dating any of the gospels before 70 CE. (And I’m pretty sure he meant “surprise and amazement” in an Isaiah 29:14 kind of way.) The host joked, “Mark says he’s not going to say anybody’s name, and then one name pops into everybody’s head”, and all the scholars chuckled knowingly, but I’m afraid I don’t know who he meant. Was this a call-out to Joseph Nobles’ favorite scholar Maurice Casey? 🤔
- He was also asked about oral tradition, and he gave this quotable line: “Of course there was oral tradition, in the sense that people were talking to one another…. We know it’s the case because we have Paul’s letters… [But] do we actually have the tools to read the gospels and extrapolate the missing oral tradition from them? I don’t think we do.”
- When pressed, Goodacre admitted he thinks it’s likely that Mark knew Paul… but he said he wasn’t able to demonstrate it, and he couldn’t say for sure. So he prefers to be professionally agnostic on the issue.
